Reckless Memories

by Catherine Cowles

  Caelyn gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Then you should go for it, honey. You know better than anyone that you only get this one precious life.”

  Kenna’s gaze snapped to Caelyn. “No, she shouldn’t. That man has done nothing but hurt her and leave her when she needed him the most. He doesn’t deserve her.”

  I swallowed back the invisible razor blades that seemed to be crawling up my throat. “It doesn’t matter, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  It was Kenna who answered. “Because she feels like she’d be betraying Violet.”

  Caelyn’s head snapped back in my direction. “Is that what you really think?”

  I gave a tiny nod. It was so much more complicated than that, though. There were so many layers of guilt and grief and anger and longing. And they all mixed together in an ugly stew that meant there would never be a happy ending for Ford and me. Not in the way I truly wanted anyway. I would have to settle for having him as my friend. I just had to make myself believe the lie that friendship would be enough.

  20

  Ford

  “Ford Hardy.”

  I looked up from my phone at the crisp tone, shoving it into my back pocket. I bit back a groan. “Mrs. Hotchkiss. Lacey.”

  “Hey, Ford.” Lacey blinked up at me as if the fluttering of her eyelashes was sending some sort of Morse code.

  Mrs. Hotchkiss’s gaze narrowed on me. “I heard you were back.”

  “That I am.”

  “You should’ve stayed gone.”

  “Mom!” Lacey’s cheeks heated as she gripped her mother’s arm.

  Mrs. Hotchkiss turned to her daughter. “It’s the truth. He should hear it.”

  My back teeth ground together. “I’m just here for a few months, helping my family out.”

  Her gaze snapped back to me. “With no regard for the family you destroyed, for how much pain it will cause them to see you here.”

  My gut twisted. “I’m not trying to cause anyone pain, but my family is here, so there’s no way around it.”

  “You sure stayed away long enough before. But now you’re back, and it’s breaking Heather’s heart. And I can’t imagine how painful it must be for Isabelle to have to see you at work every day. You need to stay away from that girl, from her family. Grant them whatever semblance of peace they have left.”

  “I’ve got to be real honest, Mrs. Hotchkiss, this is none of your damn business.” I sidestepped her as she gasped and then strode in the direction of The Catch.

  “Ford, wait!”

  A hand caught my elbow, and I spun around. “What?”

  Lacey’s cheeks were red, and she was out of breath. “I’m sorry, she’s just very protective of Mrs. Kipton, and Mrs. Kipton has been really upset that you’re back and working with Isabelle.”

  “Like I told your mother, it’s none of their damn business.”

  Lacey reached out a hand, laying it on my forearm. “You’re right, it’s not. Why don’t we go over to The Mad Baker? We can get a cup of coffee and talk.”

  I stepped out of her hold. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Violet would want you to be happy. Maybe if we talked, it would help you realize you can move on.”

  I didn’t have words for the woman in front of me. She might’ve been Vi’s friend, but I’d never liked her, and now, she was basically a stranger. If she thought I’d open up my wounds to her, she had another thing coming. Before I could tell her as much, Mrs. Hotchkiss called from down the street. “Lacey, get away from that boy. We need to go.”

  Lacey glanced at her mother and then back to me. “I’m sorry. I’ll come by the bar soon. We can talk.”

  “There’s no need.” My words were cold, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Lacey let the hurt show in her expression. “You’re hurting. I get it.”

  “No, you don’t, and you never will.” Before she could say anything else, I turned and headed towards the bar. This was what life on Anchor would always be like, some random person sticking their nose in my business and telling me how they felt about my life, what they thought I needed to do to heal. Or worse. Bell might’ve forgiven me, but there were plenty of people on this tiny island who hadn’t.

  As I reached the gravel lot in back of The Catch, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Pulling it out, I hesitated for only a moment before hitting accept. “Hey, man.”

  “Ford, how’s island life?”

  I paused for a moment, unsure how to answer that one. It was both torture and exactly where I needed to be. There were moments, like the one I’d just encountered, that heated my blood and brought back my worst memories. But there was also a sense of peace on Anchor that I’d forgotten about, something that I’d never find in LA. There was comfort in having my family close. And there was something altogether different about having Bell within arm’s reach. Something that I both wanted to lean into yet didn’t want to look too closely at.

  The hesitation as my mind spun cost me, because as one of my closest friends, Austin knew when something was up. “What’s wrong? Is your dad okay?”

  I cleared my throat and started walking again, headed for the beach. “Dad’s fine. There’s just a lot of baggage in this place for me.”

  Austin was quiet for a moment. “Family stuff?”

  Guilt gnawed at my gut. Austin had always been nothing but honest with me. Sure, he’d held his emotions close to the vest, but he’d never hidden huge events of his past from me. I’d hidden what felt like an entire other life from him and our other friend, Liam. “That’s part of it. There’s some stuff in my past…” I struggled with finding the right words. How did you tell someone something like this? “The summer before I left for college, I was in an accident. My girlfriend and her sister were in the car with me. Violet, my girlfriend, didn’t make it.” My voice grew hoarser with each word, catching on the syllables of Vi’s name. “I haven’t been back since.”

  The sound of a door closing came across the line. “Ford, I’m so sorry. God, that sounds like such a cop-out. Of course, you know I’m sorry. But I’m not sure what else to say. I just hate that you went through that.”

  I rubbed at the back of my neck as I stared out at the ocean. “Thanks, A.” I could finally look at it and say I was sorry, too. None of us had deserved how the accident had torn our lives apart. Each in very different ways, but destruction and disease ensued nonetheless. Vi would never get to put her pieces back together, but Bell and I…we had to try.

  “I’m fucking things up with her sister.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. I had been holding in all my feelings about Bell and the situation for more than a month now, and they were just dying to get out.

  Austin sucked in a sharp breath. “What’s going on? Were you guys friends?”

  Friends seemed like such a bizarre term for what Bell and I had been. She’d always been more, though not in any sort of romantic way—I just hadn’t seen her in that light. Bell had always been like another limb. She was simply a part of me. I didn’t think about it much, it just was. This girl, who had always been wise beyond her years, had seen things about me no one else did, as if she lived inside the deepest parts of my mind. And, God, I had missed it when that part of me went quiet, when she went silent. Those phantom pains had never gone away.

  I swallowed against the emotion building in my throat. “We were close.”

  Austin was quiet for a moment. “You have feelings for her.” It wasn’t a question, it was a simple statement of truth. We’d known each other for a decade, he could read between the lines.

  “I can’t.” The two words hurt as I spoke them, as if they contained a ball of barbed wire, slicing through my body as it traveled up to escape my mouth.

  Austin let out a low whistle. “Bet you’re beating yourself up pretty hard right now.”

  I chuckled and bent to pick up a rock along the shore. “If you were here, I’d let you go a few rounds in the ring with me.”

  “You’
re worse off than I thought if you want me to kick your ass.”

  I put all the force I could into sending the stone in my hand out into the ocean. “It’s so damn complicated. It’s this mess of guilt and want and anger and so many other things I don’t have a name for, and it’s making me question everything.”

  Sleep had escaped me again last night, and as I’d lain awake staring up at the ceiling, I’d kept replaying the question, have I missed what’s been right in front of me this whole time? over and over in my head. Sure, Bell had been two years younger than me, but she’d been adorably cute. Had I missed all that she brought to my life because I’d been distracted by Violet’s classic beauty? Vi and I had made sense. Starting string of the football team and one of the varsity cheerleaders. It seemed so cliché now, so…empty. I’d loved her in the way an eighteen-year-old boy could, but we had no real depth. We knew each other’s coffee orders and each other’s bodies, but did we know anything that lay below the surface? I wasn’t sure anymore.

  “That’s life, Ford. Nothing is as black and white as we want it to be. It’s all shades of gray. All we can do is try to make the best choices with what’s placed in front of us.”

  I started out down the beach, kicking a rock as I went. “That’s the problem, I don’t know what the hell to do. For the longest time, I thought Bell hated me because I was the one driving that night. I was sure she’d never be able to forgive me. So, I stayed away. Turns out it was the staying away that hurt her more than anything. She never blamed me.”

  “Of course she didn’t. It was an accident.”

  “But now, we’re in this weird space of getting to know each other again, and there are all of these landmines. You never know if one false step will make one blow up in your face.”

  Austin sighed. “I know how that feels.” He certainly did. Austin and his now-wife, Carter, had a falling out that had lasted a year. When they came back together, it had been more than a little dicey for him. “You just have to give her time. And more than anything, you need to prove that you aren’t going to leave her again.”

  Austin’s words cut. I’d hurt Bell when she was at her most vulnerable, and even though I knew she was happy that I was back in her life, I also knew she didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust me. I let out a muttered curse. “But I am leaving. In a few months, I’ll be gone again. I just need us to be in a better place when I do. I don’t want to lose her when I leave. That means the only thing that this can be is friendship.” There was too much standing in our way to have more. I wasn’t even sure Bell wanted more, but the way I caught her looking at me sometimes told me there might be.

  Austin was quiet for a moment. “Ford, wasn’t it you who once told me not to miss out on the best thing to ever happen to me? I fucked around for way too long with Carter, and I almost lost her. I can’t begin to imagine the shell of a man I’d be without her. I don’t want that for you.”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t either.” Bell had always made me a better person. She challenged me. Asked the hard questions, even when she was a little girl. Bell never let me get away with anything, and I loved that about her. It wasn’t easy with her, but it was real, and I’d had more than enough easy to last me a lifetime.

  “It wouldn’t be easy,” Austin said as if reading my mind. “And I’m sure there are a million and one things that I don’t know about that will make it even harder.” He wasn’t wrong. Fuck. My family. Hers. The gossipy people of this damn island. Not to mention the ten-ton monster on both our backs: guilt. “Just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Sometimes, the greater the difficulty, the sweeter the reward.”

  I tipped my head back to stare at the sun peeking through gray clouds. “I can’t, A. It could ruin everything.” Most importantly, my shot at keeping Bell in my life in any real way.

  “Just think about it.”

  He didn’t have to tell me that, it was all that consumed my mind.

  21

  Bell

  I let out a colorful slew of curses as the spray bottle full of cleaning solution tumbled to the floor.

  Darlene bent to pick it up, eyeing me carefully as she handed it to me. “What’s with you this morning?”

  I sprayed the table with a little more force than necessary, scrubbing the wood surface as if I could clear away all my problems along with the bar grime. “I just didn’t sleep very well last night.” That was true, but it was more that my emotional unburdening with Kenna and Caelyn had stayed with me. And not just in the redness of my eyes. It had taken root deep in my chest as if I’d lost something profound. But that something had never been mine to begin with.

  “This have anything to do with a certain boss of ours?” Darlene arched an eyebrow.

  I bristled at the word boss. Ford hadn’t pulled rank on me or any of the other staff, and I didn’t think of him that way. But it still frustrated me that he had the trump card in his back pocket if he ever wanted to use it. “No.” Lies, lies, lies.

  Darlene chuckled. “Sure, Bell.”

  “Do you want bathroom duty today?”

  Darlene held up her hands in defeat. “I’m just saying, you could do worse. And the way he was eyeing you last night… Girl, sign me up for that any night of the week.”

  I scrubbed an invisible spot on the table. “He’s all yours.”

  “No, honey. He’s all yours.”

  But Ford wasn’t mine. All of these people were mistaking his overprotective big-brother routine for jealousy or interest. It only hurt more to know how wrong they were.

  Boots sounded on the cement of the back hallway, and Darlene waggled her brows at me. I glared at her and then went back to cleaning the spots on the table only I could see. “I brought coffee and baked goods.”

  Just the low timbre of Ford’s voice had those danged butterflies taking flight in my belly. It was as if the vibrations from his words crossed the room and skittered over my skin in a physical caress. Freaking great. I needed to get a grip.

  “You know the way to my heart.” Darlene abandoned me and went straight for the treats and the hot guy. Traitor.

  “What about you, Trouble? Got room for a snickerdoodle muffin in your life?”

  The man played dirty. His sexy morning voice and my nickname? Lethal. I cleared my throat. “I’ll be over in a minute. I just want to finish this.”

  A few seconds later, I felt heat at my back. Too close. “I’m pretty sure that table was clean twenty passes ago.”

  “Can’t be too careful about germs.” My voice cracked halfway through, and I grimaced.

  Ford plucked the spray bottle and rag from my hand, leaning in close to whisper in my ear. “Go get your breakfast. Can’t have you fainting on me now.” He straightened, and with a wink, strode off in the direction of the closet where we housed the cleaning supplies.

  What the hell was with Ford and his winking? At me. He’d had that carefree teasing ease when he was younger, but I hadn’t seen much of it since he’d come back. I guess it wasn’t gone forever. I turned and headed for the bar where Darlene was fanning herself. “I’m telling you, this is better than porn and my teen dramas all rolled into one.”

  I slapped her on the shoulder as I headed for the bar sink to wash my hands. “I can’t deal with your snark before I’ve had my coffee.”

  “Well, get over here and have some of this delicious latte that hunk of a man just brought you.”

  I ignored the latter part of Darlene’s sentence and went straight for the coffee and muffin. “What’d he bring you?”

  Darlene grinned. “The man knows me well. He got my favorite, a maple bacon bar. Gotta have my daily protein.”

  I let out a half-snort, half-laugh. “That thing is ninety-nine percent sugar.”

  “Hush, you. Calories don’t count before noon.”

  I raised my coffee cup to her. “Amen to that.”

  The morning prep flew by with the three of us working. Still, I was a bumbling mess, dropping silverware and n
apkins, tripping over invisible dips in the floor. When I dropped a glass, sending it shattering into a million little pieces, Ford seemed to have had enough.

  “All right, Trouble. You and I are taking the afternoon off.”

  “W-what?” I couldn’t help the stutter in my words. “We can’t. We have to work.” Not to mention the fact that alone time with Ford in my current state was a horrible idea.

  Ford stepped over the glass and lifted me effortlessly onto the bar top. I huffed. “I’m wearing Converse, it’s not like I’m going to cut myself.”

  “Better safe than sorry. Stay here.”

  I scowled at his retreating back as he turned to grab the broom and dustpan. “I’m going to get this cleaned up. You are going to go upstairs to put on whatever you wear hiking, and then we are getting out of here for the day.”

  My scowl deepened. “Are we now?” The nerve of this man.

  “We are.”

  I jumped off the bar top as Ford finished sweeping. “Well, boss man, I don’t leave my employees to handle a lunch rush on their own.”

  “We can totally handle it on our own,” Darlene called from the other side of the bar. Such a little traitor.

  “Yup, we’ve got it covered,” Hank echoed from the kitchen.

  “See?” Ford arched a brow. “You’ve got good people who can handle whatever tourist hordes come their way, and the new trainee will be here in an hour. Now, get changed, and let’s go. We’ll pick up lunch on the way.”

  My mouth opened and closed, searching for an excuse, but everything I landed on sounded like the ultimate cop-out. “Fine.” I headed for the back stairs, stomping like a two-year-old the whole way.

  Ford pulled his SUV to a stop in one of the parking spots on the outskirts of town. “The General Store? For lunch?”